Austal did not tolerate racial harassment, juries rule

Two juries in federal civil trials have found that Mobile shipbuilder Austal did not tolerate a racially hostile work environment.

The juries ruled in favor of Austal and against plaintiffs Cynthia Bumpers, Nathaniel L. Reed, Fred Williams, Tesha Hollis, Larry J. Laffiette, Ron Law, and Jerome Pettibone in the trials that were held in March and April at the U.S. District Court in Mobile.

Former employees of the company filed the federal lawsuits against Austal in 2008 alleging that it didn't do enough to protect the employees from racial discrimination.

In August, the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that seven of 13 plaintiffs with racially-based claims against the defense contractor could proceed to a hearing in a lower court in Mobile.

Previously, AL.com reported that Williams, a former company employee, testified in the first trial last month that racial slurs, racist jokes, swastikas, and references to the Ku Klux Klan were scrawled on the bathrooms walls and the ships at Austal USA.

Williams, showed the jury cell phone photos he shot on the job of the racist graffiti. He also showed photos he took of an employee wearing a button-down, long-sleeve confederate flag shirt, an employee wearing a black confederate flag t-shirt, and an employee wearing a t-shirt that depicted a half-naked woman wearing a confederate flag.

Attempts to tell management about the racism were ignored or mocked, he said.

But Brian McCarthy, an attorney for Austal, said that the Austal employee handbook, given to all employees during orientation, prohibits all forms of harassment. The human resources department, he said, had an "open door policy," where employees could walk in at any time and voice their complaints.

At the time of the alleged harassment, about 1,000 Austal employees were using Sharpie markers to mark their work while welding aluminum plates together, McCarthy said. It led to an outbreak of undetectable vandalism.

He also said that Austal management cleaned graffiti off bathroom walls regularly, painted the bathrooms black to discourage the graffiti, and issued memos to employees stating that they could be fired if they were caught writing graffiti.

Furthermore, minorities made up 32.5 percent of Austal's workforce in 2006, more than seven percent the regional average at the time, McCarthy said.